A Death in Summer (34 page)

“The Friends of St. Christopher’s.”

She gave a bitter laugh. “Yes, that is what they called themselves.” She turned herself sideways on the sofa to look at him. “You know they used that place as a brothel, yes? The priest, Ambrose, he was the—what is the word?—the
souteneur.
”

“The pander?”

“Yes, the pander—the pimp.”

Quirke stood up and went to the counter again and poured the last of the wine, and walked with his glass to the window with the palm in it and looked down towards the bay. The child was down there, with her nurse, walking along by the water. He heard Françoise approach and stop behind him.

“Why did you leave like that,” he asked, not turning to her, “without even a telephone call?”

She was behind him now; he could feel the warmth of her and smell her perfume. “I told you,” she said. “That night in the garden, when Giselle went back to the house and we had to search for her—I thought I had lost her. I thought they had got her.”

“‘They’?”

“Richard’s people. I was so frightened, in such a panic. You do not know what they are like, what they are capable of.”

He saw himself again in Mount Street, staring into the gutter, at what was lying there. He had not told her about Sinclair.

He turned to face her. “Tell me what happened, that Sunday.”

There was a silence. She was looking at him now as she had not looked at him before, as if for the first time, her head tilted to the side and her eyes narrowed. “You know,” she said softly, “don’t you.”

He nodded.

“When?” she whispered.

“The day we had lunch, that first time, at the Hibernian. You tried to get me to suspect that Carlton Sumner had killed your husband.”

“But—how?”

“I don’t know. But I knew it had to be you.”

“And Dannie—?”

“Dannie couldn’t have done it, I was certain of that. Maguire? No. Carlton Sumner? Possible, but very unlikely. His son, Teddy? No. So that left you.”

“You knew, and yet you—we—”

“Yes.”

Yes, he thought, I knew, and still I went with you, over to the side of night.

*   *   *

The shore was a pebbled slope running sharply down into a sluggish sea. Directly before them a huge yellow-gold moon sat fatly just above the horizon, its broadening track shimmering and swaying upon the inky water. Fishing boats were out there, they could see their bobbing lights, and more than once they thought they heard the fishermen calling to each other. The night air was soft and cool. They sat on a wooden bench at the edge of the pebbles. Quirke was smoking a cigarette, and Françoise lay against him with her head on his shoulder and her legs drawn up under her. Maria had put the child to bed, and they had come down the hill to walk by the sea. Now they sat listening to the waves at their ceaseless small turning.

“She told me that day, you see,” Françoise said. “Dannie told me not only about what Richard had done to her for all those years when she was a child, but what Richard was doing now with Giselle. She had spoken to him that morning, had pleaded with him, but of course he only laughed in her face.
I had you when you were young,
he said to her,
now I have a new one, all of my own.
When I arrived at Brooklands I found her lying on the floor—on the floor, yes—curled up, you know, like a little baby. At first she would say nothing; then she told me. She had his shotgun on the floor beside her. She said she had tried to make herself go up to the office again and confront him, threaten him—shoot him, even. But she was not strong enough.”

“And you were.”

“Yes, I was.” She took the cigarette from his fingers and drew on it with a quick, hissing sound and then gave it back to him. How eerie the smoke looked when she exhaled it, like ectoplasm dispersing into the darkness. “Will you believe me,” she said, “if I tell you that I have no memory of doing it? Or no, no, I have one memory. It is of Richard’s face when he heard me behind him and turned. He was sitting at his desk, going through papers. He was wearing his old tweed jacket with—what do you call them?—patches, yes, leather patches on the elbows. It was what he always wore when he was dealing with the horses, he thought it brought him luck. When he turned and saw me, with the gun, do you know what he did? He smiled. Such a strange smile. Did he think I was playing a joke? No—no, I think he knew very well what I was going to do. And he smiled. What did it mean—can you say?”

But Quirke said nothing.

“And then,” Françoise said, “I must have fired the gun, straight into his face.”

*   *   *

They walked up the hill slowly, laboriously, as if they had suddenly become old. By now the moon had swung itself higher above the bay, and below them its gold track on the sea had narrowed. There were night birds of some kind, pale things, swooping in silence furtively among the palms. Music was playing somewhere, dance-band music, tiny and gay in the distance. They could hear the faint swish of traffic, too, far off down on the Promenade. Quirke looked up and saw a strew of stars like a smear of mist down the center of the sky.

As they came through the gates they could see the lights of the house up on the rock, burning behind the glass sidewall.

“He used to taunt me, you know,” Françoise said. “He never admitted anything, of course, but he knew I knew, and he would tease me. He brought Marie from the orphanage to work for us. She had been a child when she started there, and now she was too old for him, but still he wanted to keep her, as he wanted to keep them all, as if they were trophies, to display before his friends, before me.” She leaned against Quirke as if she suddenly felt faint. “How could I have let him do such things? How could I? And how could I let him go on doing them?”

They went up in the little lift together, not speaking. The sense of her, the smell of her, so near to him. The gate of the lift clattered open.

“Why two doors?” Quirke asked, as they stepped out.

“What?”

“Why did he keep the two front doors, your husband, when he was putting the four apartments into one?”

She looked at him. “I don’t know. He was like that, he had to keep everything.”

“Even you.”

She turned away, searching for her key.

Once inside, she went off to check on the child, and then came back. “I have told Maria that she can sleep in the guest room,” she said. “Shall I get you a drink?”

“Whiskey,” Quirke said. “Have you got whiskey?”

She found a bottle in a cupboard and poured a measure into a crystal goblet. She poured nothing for herself. Quirke felt a stabbing pain under his ribs on the right side, and was glad of it. He would be glad, now, of anything that was real.

Françoise handed him the goblet, and he drank.

“You did sleep with Sumner, didn’t you,” he said, “when he made that pass at you, here?”

She had been turning away from him and now turned back. She thought for a moment. “Yes,” she said calmly, “yes, I did.” She smiled. “I’m sorry, have I hurt you? You have that ‘how could you?’ look that men take on.”

“And you didn’t tell your husband,” Quirke went on. “He found out. Is that why he threw Sumner out? Is that why they fought at that meeting in Roundwood?”

Her smile had turned pitying. “You think you know so much,” she said, “but really, you know so little.
I
asked them to go. It had become—inconvenient. Sumner, too; he is another little boy refusing to give up the toy he has stolen. You are all the same.”

He nodded, gazing at her.

“You knew I knew, didn’t you,” he said. “You knew I knew you had shot your husband.”

She stared at him. “No,” she said, her voice hardening, “of course not.”

“But you were worried that I might guess. That’s why you took me into your bed, in the hope that it would keep me from suspecting.”

“How can you say such a thing!”

They were standing in the middle of the floor, facing each other, Quirke with the glass in his hand and Françoise d’Aubigny in her robe of Roman purple staring at him, her fists clenched in anger at her sides.

“I made a fool of myself for you,” Quirke said. He felt calm; cold, and quite calm. The pain in his side had stopped; he wished it would come back. “I made a fool of myself for you,” he said again. “I insulted my conscience.”

The woman’s face twitched, as if she might be about to laugh. “Your conscience,” she said. “Please, do not lie. Lie to me if you like, but not to yourself.”

He sighed, and walked away from her and sat down on a complicated little chair made of stainless steel and white leather. He sat there, looking at her.

“You shot him,” he said, “but you didn’t forget. You knew exactly what you were doing.”

“I told you, it was because of Giselle—”

“I know that, I know. I don’t even blame you. But what you said to me, I say back to you: don’t lie. You shot him, and you took your handkerchief and you wiped the gun all over, and put it in his hands to make it look like suicide, and went back and told Dannie what you had done. Then you called the Guards, and wouldn’t give your name. And then you took the Land Rover and drove away, and stayed away, and then came back, as if you hadn’t been there at all. Didn’t you.”

She was smiling, but still there was that faint twitch along her cheek.

“We could have been happy, you and I,” she said. “You could have come to live with me, among the grown-ups. But you prefer your little life, don’t you.”

He stood up from the chair—he felt so tired, so tired—and went to the counter and put the empty glass there. He picked up the snow globe and cupped the cool weight of it in his hand. A few flakes of snow fluttered up, and one or two settled on the slanted roof of the château. A tiny world, perfect and changeless.

“Dundrum, that hospital,” he said. “It
is
a terrible place.”

She gave him a quizzical look; it seemed to him she was almost smiling. “But you won’t let them send her there,” she said, “will you, Dr. Quirke?”

He put the glass globe into his pocket, and turned away.

*   *   *

In Dublin it was raining, and the air felt like steam. By the time Quirke got to the flat he was soaked through to the skin, and his shoes made a squelching sound. He shook as much water from his hat as he could and to keep its shape shoved it down onto the head of a life-sized plaster bust of Socrates that someone had given him once for a joke. The only room he had been able to find in Nice the night before was in a fleapit up a lane run by an Arab with black teeth and a scar. He had not slept, only dozed fitfully, worried that someone would come in to rob him and slit his throat. At dawn he had walked on the front, looking at the sea which was already blue although the sun was hardly up, and had stopped at a café, and drunk three cups of bitter coffee, and had felt sick. And now he was home.

Home.

He did not phone, but went straight to Pearse Street. Hackett looked at him, and nodded, and said, “I can see you’ve been through the wars.”

They went up to Hackett’s office and Hackett summoned Sergeant Jenkins and told him to fetch a pot of tea. When the young man had gone he sat back on the chair and lifted his feet in their big boots and perched them on a corner of his desk. Behind him the grimed window wept. Quirke flexed his shoulders, and the bentwood chair on which he sat sent up a cry of protest. He had never in his life been so weary as he was now.

“So,” Hackett said, “you’re back from your travels. Did you see all you went to see?”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“And?”

“I spoke to her.”

“You spoke to her.”

Quirke closed his eyes and gouged his fingers into them, pressing them until they pained. “What about Sumner?” he asked.

“Sumner the father or Sumner the son?”

“Whichever. Both.”

The air in the room was blued from the smoke of Hackett’s cigarette. He shifted his boots on the desk and wriggled his backside deeper into the sagging seat of his swivel chair.

“Young Sumner,” he said, “will get a suspended sentence, and his daddy will ship him off to Canada, for good, this time.”

Quirke was studying him, that big pallid smugly smiling face. “You did a deal,” he said, “didn’t you.”

“I did a deal. Teddy gave me Costigan and the Duffy brothers who cut off your assistant’s finger, and I gave him Canada. A fair exchange.”

“And Costigan, what will he get?”

“Oh, that’s for the court to decide,” the detective said, putting on a pious look.

“What does that mean?”

“Every man is innocent until proved guilty.”

“Are you telling me he’ll get off?”

Hackett had his hands clasped behind his head and was considering the ceiling. “As you will remember from our previous dealings with Mr. Costigan,” he said, “the man has powerful friends in this town. But we’ll do our best, Dr. Quirke, we’ll do our best.”

“And St. Christopher’s?”

“Father Ambrose is to be transferred, I believe.”